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Territories,” at least those that network television usually prefers not to explore.
    Besides suggesting the rather unusual ambition or scope that has often been attributed to Farscape , then, that notion of a constant branching out also affords a different view of individual human direction, pointing up how seldom life follows a simple, plotted line, and rather how much is due to the chance occurrence, the unpredictable event. For example, as the series opens Crichton is helping to develop the “Farscape Project,” an international high-velocity deep-space exploration mission, when that wormhole deposits him in the middle of a space battle. There he collides with another ship, causing it to crash and bringing the Peacekeeper Crais, brother of the pilot killed in the crash, to vow that he will capture and kill Crichton. His planned future as an astronaut, following in the path set out by his father, Jack Crichton, is thus completely sidetracked by a series of quite literal accidents that open up a completely new future, one in which getting home gives way to figuring out how to make himself at home in this newly complex, seemingly constantly changing reality that he now inhabits. In fact, given the possibilities of time and dimensional travel that Crichton discovers over the course of the series, infinite realities begin to seem possible, even infinite personal destinies. That fact is especially thrust home when, in the “Kansas” episode (4.12), he finds that his presence in the past has accidentally altered Earth history so that his father is scheduled to helm the doomed Challenger shuttle mission—and his death would invariably affect John’s life as well. Having to “fix” the past just so that he can go on to an unpredictable future, Crichton begins to realize the very contingent nature of his life.
    More to the point, over the course of the series he gradually comes to recognize that the very concepts of home, family, and even self are all similarly contingent and subject to change. Home, finally, is not necessarily the Earth but some place still “uncharted.” His family is the one he is in the process of creating with his Sebacean mate Aeryn, the child she gives birth to in the middle of a firefight in The Peacekeeper Wars miniseries, and those “strange alien life forms” that have become his friends, 4 his support, even his saviors through all of his wanderings. What Crichton comes to realize is that his real task is becoming at peace with the sense of instability that this state of affairs brings, with the fact that destiny is not a carefully planned out scientific expedition like the Farscape Project on which he was working, but rather a constantly evolving set of paths that he must choose and/or to which he must adapt. If that sort of conception is challenging, if that view of human life as defined by accident demands a revisioning of our sense of human nature or of life’s purpose, it is also a valuable challenge, one that again speaks directly to the show’s cult appeal. For it reminds us not only of what might be found in that sort of “walking after midnight” that Kawin describes (25), but also of our own responsibility in the accident of destiny. Thus whereas Crichton, in the premier episode, tells his father, “I can’t be your kind of hero,” he is challenged over the course of the series and finally must commit himself to a most fundamental human task, one with which anyone can identify: finding out just what “kind of hero” he can be. Such a task, I would suggest, sits well with a cult audience, with viewers who are looking for something, even if they are not quite sure what.
    But this point recalls that sense of compensation that, Virilio and Lotringer assure us, is typically part of the economy of our accident-prone culture, or as Edward Tenner has described such